12 Held in Sale of Pest Poisons, One 60 Times as Potent as the Legal Limit

Agents raiding a Chinatown supermarket in search of pesticides not approved for sale to the public.Credit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

The investigation began with a vial of blue-green liquid. Roughly two inches tall, it came in a yellow and blue box covered with Chinese characters and, in English, the words “The cat be unemployed.”

It was rat poison, illegal and highly toxic.

The pesticide, which was apparently smuggled into the United States from China, contained one deadly ingredient in a concentration almost 61 times as great as what federal regulations allow, according to court papers.

The chemical, brodifacoum, is so dangerous, officials said, that its use is illegal in urban areas unless it is applied by licensed professionals wearing protective gear and using special equipment. Federal regulators have recently moved to further restrict its use, in part because its ingestion could kill a small child.

Several of the vials were among about 6,000 packages of rat and cockroach poison seized from shops and street vendors in and around Chinatown during a five-month undercover investigation into the sale of illegal pesticides, state and local officials announced at a news conference Monday.

The vials, they said, first came to the attention of the authorities because a woman who had bought one in the East Broadway Mall in Chinatown last year later mistook the pesticide for medicine, consumed it and became seriously ill, losing two-thirds of her blood volume, according to the court papers. Brodifacoum is an anticoagulant that kills rodents by causing them to bleed to death internally. Another chemical in one of the pesticides, sodium fluoroacetate, is a metabolic poison used to kill coyotes.

The inquiry, which involved a half-dozen agencies that enforce laws regarding pesticides, culminated last week when investigators executed 14 search warrants, mostly in Chinatown, arrested 12 people on federal and state criminal charges — all of them misdemeanors — and conducted nearly four dozen civil inspections, officials said.

The agencies involved in the investigation, including the offices of the district attorney and the United States attorney in Manhattan, the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department of Environmental Conservation, said their investigation highlighted the widespread sale of toxic pesticides in densely populated neighborhoods where vermin abound.

“All across the city we find products like these,” Judith Enck, the E.P.A.’s regional administrator, said at the news conference, referring to a display of colorful unregulated pesticides that she said could easily be confused for children’s toys or candy. “People and businesses that make and sell these products are playing Russian roulette with people’s health.”

Many of the products, she said in an interview, are carcinogenic or poisonous to nerve cells and “have the potential to do long-term damage.”

The E.P.A., Ms. Enck added, “is particularly concerned about children coming into contact with these products, because children are particularly vulnerable to the toxic impact — their bodies are still developing.”

During the last five months, undercover investigators bought illegal pesticides in shops on Madison, Mott, South Eldridge and Pike Streets in Chinatown, the officials said.

Photo

Investigators say a package labeled "The Cat Be Unemployed" contains brodifacoum, a toxic chemical barred from use in urban areas unless it is applied by a professional.Credit
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation

Ten of those arrested last week were charged in state court and will be prosecuted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office; two others — one identified in court papers as a wholesaler of the illegal pesticides, the other a grocery store owner who was charged with selling thousands of packets of the products to undercover investigators — will be prosecuted in federal court by the office of the United States attorney in Manhattan.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., whose investigators seized the majority of the illegal pesticides, suggested that it would be worth considering legislation to allow prosecutors to seek harsher penalties for such crimes, based on the concentrations and quantities sold.

“The rodenticides and roach killers that were seized as part of this investigation,” Mr. Vance said, “are dangerous, unregulated products that contain chemicals so toxic they exceed government regulation scores at times.”

And, he added, they “are particularly dangerous to kids because they look and smell like cookies or other objects that would attract the human touch.”

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement that “these defendants were literally peddling poison to an unwitting public, putting the health and safety of their customers and their families in jeopardy.”

Children are especially vulnerable because many pesticides are placed on floors and the children sometimes place bait pellets in their mouths, according to Adrian J. Enache, a toxicologist who leads the E.P.A.’s pesticides program in New York.

The American Association of Poison Control Centers receives 12,000 to 15,000 reports each year of children younger than 6 being exposed to these kinds of pesticides. But Ms. Enck and other officials said it was hard to gauge the scope of the problem and its impact on children because many cases of poisoning go unreported. Ms. Enck said that when children exhibit symptoms that include eye and skin irritations and nausea, parents are often unaware that the pesticides are at fault.

The inquiry is continuing, with investigators focusing on identifying and tracking down the sources of the unregistered pesticides, according to David G. McLeod Jr., the assistant special agent in charge of the E.P.A.’s criminal investigation division in New York.

The wholesaler, Jai Ping Chen, 43, was charged with five counts of conspiracy and four counts of selling unregistered pesticides. The grocery store owner, Cheng Yan Huang, 56, was charged with nine counts of similar crimes. If convicted, both face a year in prison for each count.

The 10 men and women charged in state court face multiple misdemeanor charges, in some cases hundreds of counts, and while the jail time is negligible, many violations carry a maximum fine of $5,000 per count.

Ms. Enck said she believed people bought the poison because they thought it was “the strongest and most potent product.”

She added: “Unfortunately, these are readily available and there is an assumption that if they’re sold in stores, they’re legal. And another reason is they are relatively cheap.”

Noah Rosenberg contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2011, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: 12 Held in Sale of Pest Poisons, One 60 Times as Potent as the Legal Limit. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe